paradox_modfanmadebackupfandomcom-20200215-history
Soviet Tanks
"Out of all the weapons in the battlefield, from Allied aircraft to Japanese mecha, there is no worse enemy in the world than a Soviet Tank Division. To anyone facing them, good luck and godspeed. You'll need it." :- Colonel Jeff Bennings, Allied officer during WW3 =Fighting Vehicles= ICV-4 Pincer Infantry Combat Vehicle Main Article: Pincer ICV KDB-2 Bullfrog Main Article: Bullfrog PT-74 Flak Traktor Main Article: Flak Traktor ZSU-44 Main Article: Chameleon_ZSU =Support Vehicles= VZG-405 Ore Collector Main Article: Soviet Ore Collector VX-07 Sputnik Main Article: Sputnik K-100 Transport Truck Main Article: Dump Truck T-100 Mobile Construction Vehicle Main Article: Soviet MCV =Battle Tanks= T-29 Potato Tank One of the Soviets' earliest tank designs, the T-29 left the drawing board in 1931, merely a few years after the move to motorise the Red Army. Designed as a support tank, the T-29 was extremely small and nimble, at a mere 3 tonnes of weight. It was meant to be a reconnaissance vehicle, using its superior speed to scout ahead of friendly troops and spot for artillery. In addition, they were to provide cover for Soviet infantry, as well as defend heavier tanks from enemy infantry trying to close the distance with their grenades. To help it fulfill these roles, the T-29 was fitted with the compact, but powerful GAZ-AA engine, which propelled the T-29 to an impressive top speed of 42km/h, even across rough terrain. A 7.62mm DT light machine gun gave it the ability to retaliate against soft targets, as well as provide suppression fire for infantry to advance. Soon, it went into mass production, with hundreds rolling off the lines every week. Named the Potato as it was the staple of the Soviet armour division, they were intended to serve as the new calvary division, charging around the enemy to encircle them while the heavier units slowly pushed the enemy back, in theory anyway. In practice though, it was a very different story. When WWII broke out, it soon became apparent that it was nigh impossible for the T-29 to properly flank the enemy. Its complete lack of armour meant that even heavy machine guns could bring it to a halt, and the 30mm cannon from the M4 Beagle would literally send it up in flames. Slower and less well armed than its Allied counterpart, the T-29 suffered in combat, failing to achieve any sort of combat success against the Allied Nations. Even when the T-29s successfully surrounded an infantry division, the sluggish Soviet Army took far too long to come to their aid, and eventually the Allies were able to break through. The final nail in the coffin came when an entire company of T-29s were disabled due to heavy rains and soft terrain, causing their narrow tracks to sink deep into the ground. After months of failure, Soviet commanders decided that the Potato was simply not worth their time, and all production of it was stopped. Any remaining T-29s were relegated to logistics and throwaway spotters. This disastrous experience with the light tankette was the foundation of the unofficial motto of the Soviet Armour Division, "bigger is better", a mentality that would stick around for nearly 3 decades. Eventually, Soviet commanders will regret this decision in WWIII, when they encounter the fast and agile mecha divisions from the Empire of the Rising sun, which literally ran rings around the lumbering Hammers and Anvils. This gave the T-29 a second chance, as it was forced back onto the battlefield as a stopgap while the new Flak Traktors were built. T-29s were pulled out of warehouses from across the Soviet Union, fitted with a modern engine, modern armour, thicker tracks and a 30mm autocannon, and sent back on the battlefield. While still inferior to the Imperial mecha, they proved capable enough to withstand the enemy's assault, slowing down the enemy long enough for the main army to react and move into position. Soviet commanders learnt to rely on them to counter Empire tactics, which depended on exploiting key weaknesses before the Soviets can react. Slowly, the reputation of the T-29 began to grow as they held line after line in the face of a relentless assault, until they were seen as heros, worthy of fighting alongside Hammers and even Apocalypses. Eventually, the T-29 was officially retired by the end of WWIII, replaced by the modern Flak Traktor, and most were smelted and turned into building materials for their descendants. Behind the scenes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-27 T-40 Sokha Medium Tank When the Soviet Union started to produce tanks in the period after WWI, they generally followed convention with and divided tanks along the lines of heavy "breakthrough" tanks and light tanks in scouting and harassment roles. However, after comparison with possible adversaries armies, some officers noted that the Soviets lacked an effective way to deal with enemy tanks, as light tanks didn't have the armaments needed to deal with tanks, nor enough armour to survive an encounter with other tanks, and heavy tanks just couldn't react fast enough. To tackle these problems, a combined team of engineers (with both light tank and heavy tank experts) was ordered to design an tank that followed some very strict guidelines. While this severely restricted the engineers' options, they still managed to work around it and produce a tank that could face of against almost any tank of its age. This didn't mean that the design process was easy. For example, the first designs used two engines to drive one of the tracks each, but this soon proved to be very ineffective, as one broken engine meant that the tank was limited to running in circles. So the engines were fitted in-line one one side of the tank, forcing the turret to be moved to the other side. another problem was the armour, which had to be placed at a large angle to be effective at the imposed maximum thickness. Even after these changes, field tests made during training exercises with the prototypes showed that the 57mm gun that the turret was designed around proved severely underpowered. As the engineers already expected this, and faced with a long stay in the Gulag if they could not fix this (if they were lucky), they set out to find a way to fit a bigger gun on the tank. After a hectic period of redesigns (where most of the engineers practically lived in their offices), the team managed to finish a proposal for a redesigned turret carrying a 76.2mm cannon in less then a week after the first official trials had finished. The new turret design was hastily constructed and installed on some of the prototypes. The engineers were just about to start placing a new turret on the third vehicle, when an political officer came into the factory carrying recently approved orders that demanded the engineers produce a new and more powerful design. Surprised that the engineers had already managed to do exactly that, he quickly suggested to his superiors that they should put the tank in production. After more field trials, the T-40 was put into service and designated T-40/76 Sokha, or "plough". The new design proved very effective in the many border skirmishes and internal conflicts the Soviet Union faced between the first and second World War. While these conflicts lacked the tank battles the T-40 was designed for, it still managed to leave a mark on history here. Another important observation that the political officer relayed to his superiors was the ease at which the T-40 could be adapted to accommodate new weapons. While this partially ignored the huge amount of work that the engineers had put into the design, the T-40 could indeed be modified quite easily. As a result, many experimental weapon loadouts were created. Except for the usual 76.2 mm cannon, which was later replaced by a new turret (and later hull upgrades) that supported 85 and then even 100mm guns, the T-40/45-2 variant of the Sokha can be considered as one of the most historically most important, as it introduced a the concept of a twin gun turret (in this case two 45mm guns), some even came full circle and were equipped with the 57mm the original prototype mounted. The high rate of fire that this design could maintain did much to popularise the concept of twin barrelled tanks in Soviet military doctrine. The T-40 would not see any tank on tank combat until the start of the Second World War. Here the Sokha really showed what it was capable of, even as the design started to show its age. However, Stalin considered the T-40 to be completely outdated (something most commanders quietly disagreed with), and ordered most of them scrapped, their guns dismounted and fitted onto self propelled guns, and the remaining parts molten down to produce more Anvils. This meant that only a small number of the T-40s that were originally produced remained in service. However, the Soviet Union had produced so many T-40s that most tank divisions still possessed one or two battalions of T-40s, though these were mostly relegated to scouting or combating light tanks. Whilst these tanks had avoided being scrapped, in most cases the 76.2mm gun would have been removed, so they would have to be refitted with other weapons, generally upgrades such as 85mm guns or later the much more powerful 100mm or conversions into tank destroyers or self propelled artillery. KV-1 Heavy Tank An old abandoned series of tanks consisting of the KV-1, KV-2, and the planned KV-3. They were heavy and slow, and deemed too complex and expensive to build even for Soviet arsenals. The KV-1 used a single 76.2mm gun, and later the more powerful 85mm and later still the 100, 107mm and 122mm guns, which could deal with period tanks, but were simply too slow and not well armed or armoured enough to effectively fight Allied counterparts, with the compromises needed to fit the 122mms being quite unacceptable. They were phased out of service shortly after the start of the Second World War, and used as the basis of a few self-propelled guns, all of which were short-lived. All surviving examples reside in museums in Eastern Europe as display cases, as any machines sold to other nations are assumed destroyed. Along with the KV-1, there was a specialized anti-bunker version known as the KV-2, armed with a snub-nosed 152mm howitzer and both affectionately and hostily referred to as the "Derp Gun" by the troops which used it, but the tank itself was infamous for unreliability due to being pressed beyond it's weight limit. Once they had proven their lack-of-worth, they were either converted into open-top tank destroyers with anything from 100mms to 152mms (such as the SU-152) or converted back into the -1 model, with the leftover turrets affixed to static defenses which fell out of use after WWII. The prospect of reviving the concept was considered for a combat engineering role, but ultimately denied, since the machine would have been too bloated to operate under it's own weight, let alone as a combat engineering vehicle. The majority of people see the KVs as the machines that would cement Soviet design ideals later on, and had they faced off against machines they were designed against rather than heavier vehicles, are predicted to have performed excellently had the march of technology not claimed them, as it was resistant to most anti-armour weapons of the 1930s and early 40s, such as the 50mm HV cannon. More prominent use of 75mm thick armour and larger weapons precluded the tank from being used effectively, and it was thus overshadowed by the more durable and powerful Anvil. The tanks on display for ceremonial purposes seem to be exempt from the Soviet idea of not throwing things out, though it is presumably due to the fact that the "shoebox" design of the tank and the rarity of it even as a decorative piece means that the Soviets have left the few confirmed remaining vehicles are either in museums in the USSR and satellite states, or restored machines in the hands of collectors worldwide. Rumours that they were to be recommissioned and armed with Desolator Defoliant or flamethrowers were dispelled by the fact that it lacked the ability to get in range to use the weapon without having to either sacrifice armour to pick up speed (mooting the point of it in the first place), or having even more armour added to it, slowing down the machine further. The idea of a "KV-1S" was tossed around for about a week before it was decided that it would divert resources away from more pressing matters. An interesting fact worth noting is that the Tractor Plant initially intended to use an enlongated KV-1/2 hull to serve as the basis of the SMK, a five-turreted tank armed with a Tesla coil and four 30mm cannons, but it was decided that the SMK would have too little armour and armament for its size, leading to the KV-3's short development instead. KV-4 Heavy Tank After the failure of the KV-3 which only served to further competing manufacturing plants, Chelybinsk wasn't about to just make tractors. Instead, a fourth and final machine of the KV series was planned, and while the man who they had been named for, Kliment Voroshilov, had long since fallen out of political favour, the name was retained for consistency with the rest of the series. While it would have retained much of what made a KV a KV - then-cutting edge armour that would have become obsolete later, the KV-4, it was decided, wouldn't have been competing against the Anvil - being phased out for the Rhino at the time - or the Mammoth and later Terminator, but instead a happy medium between the two, in case one was too much and the other two little. The tank sported a single 122 mm M62-T2 gun and a single 7.62mm machine gun which could be dropped if need be, as well as an autoloader system which eliminated the need for a loader. The turret was almost directly copied from the Anvil, and enlarged and up-armoured to fit with a heavier machine. The end result would have been a a tank which could have served the Red Army well, if the factory it would have been built in hadn't been ordered to stop building tanks by the Premier himself.. Rumour has it they produced four examples anyway for private testing - but what's private in the Soviet Union? Naturally, nothing is. The factory was forcefully shut down for going against the Premier's orders, and presumably the four tanks were destroyed when hostilities opened back up with the Allies or were sold off for scrap. Regardless, as far as the Red Army is concerned, the KV-4 never has, and never will, exist. So thorough was the destruction of evidence the KV-4 existed, most Allied intelligence operatives who know of the machine actually doubt it entered the test phase as a mild steel prototype, as all that has survived was the blueprints, masquerading as the "ST-I". The fact that it is written in Ukrainian instead of Russian lends even more likelyhood to the idea that the KV-4 was either propaganda or someone's prank. The M62-T2 gun developed for it, however, sees a slight degree of production for the sheer sake of having a powerful gun that didn't blast a Guardian tank to pieces when it was converted into an SPG. T-55 Anvil Heavy Tank Main Article: Anvil Heavy Tank The unveiling of the T-55 heavy tank at the start of World War II came as a shock of the most unpleasant kind to the Soviet Union's enemies. The 90 tonne battle tank, protected by 203mm thick sloped armour plating and armed with a pair of 107mm Zis-24 tank guns, simply steamrolled all opposition during the first few weeks of the war, showing the rest of Europe just how far behind the Soviets they were when it came to armoured vehicle design. The T-55 came into existence by the order of Stalin himself, who had ordered the design of a "heavy tank to rival all heavy tanks". Certainly, it was a monster without equal, one that made the other tanks of the time look like toy cars by comparison. The T-40 medium tank--the workhorse of the Soviet army before the Anvil's introduction, and itself a fine design that was already ahead of many of its contemporaries--was itself no match for the Anvil, as field trials quickly proved. Only the German Mastiff, itself thought to be an exceptionally powerful and heavy tank prior to the start of the war, was any match for the Anvil, a fact that would cause the formative Allied Nations to scramble to churn out as many Mastiffs as they could. Worsening the plight of the Union's enemies was that the Anvil had been deployed in significant numbers by the start of the war, to the shock of high ranking officials, who wouldn't have thought the Union capable of fielding such monstrosities in any significant numbers. Yet, the Soviets already had untold thousands of Anvils spearheading the attack on Europe, and hundreds of factories and even more war factories across the Union were churning out these tanks at a staggering rate, so much that other tanks--such as T-40s--were smelted down for raw material to produce more Anvils. Not until much later in the war would the Anvil's many flaws be exposed, once the momentum of the Soviet assault had wound down and the Allied Nations began a vicious counterattack. T-58 Rhino Battle Tank Main Article: Rhino Tank T-64 Hammer Battle Tank Main Article: Hammer Tank MCFM-1 Scrapper Tank Main Article: Scrapper Tank = Superheavy Tanks = A superheavy tank is generally defined as a vehicle weighing at least one hundred tons; such vehicles are large, well armed and armoured, but typically slow, difficult to turn, expensive and often have difficulty in rough terrain. Most armies decided against such vehicles, but the Soviet Union embraced them during the Second World War, and they have been an integral part of their doctrine ever since. JS-1 Elephant Tank Main Article: Elephant Tank KV-3 Heavy Tank The reason why the Mammoth was so radically different from the original JS-1 is because of this vehicle, a very early prototype armed with a pair of potent 88mm cannons. Little is known of this tank, other than that it seems to be two KV-1s cut in half, widened to 1.5 times their original width, and attached to be roughly 1.5 times as long. While the machine was little more than a test bed - being considerably smaller than the other machines in its role - and weighing a (comparatively) measly 122 tons, the KV-3 was to sport a pair of 122mm cannons as had been developed for many SPGs- albeit for anti-ground only--and a single 30mm autocannon mounted on its turret, giving anti-infantry and anti-aircraft defence. The primary complaint levelled against it was that it "wasn't enough"; hence, the task of building a superheavy tank was passed to other factories, with only two KV-3s built--one with the 130mm cannon, the other with twin 122mms. Both were destroyed when the Allies retook Berlin, with the turret of the 130mm-equipped tank being destroyed and the inverse occurring for the tank with twin 122s. The British Army shipped the twin-gun turret and the surviving hull westward, tested them in England, and mated the two together. The only KV-3 in existence presently resides in the Bovington Tank Museum, gutted of its engine and optics and simply existing as a lifeless husk, a far cry from its successors. The only things learned from the KV-3 was that the concept was reasonably workable - though by the time the KV-3 was hurriedly thrown into Berlin's defense, the JS-2 was already in production. JS-2 Mammoth Tank Main Article: Mammoth Tank JS-3 Terminator Tank At the close of the Second World War, Stalin demanded that a better superheavy tank be produced in order to crush the Allied menace. Though he didn't live to see it completed, the JS-3 tank would have lived up to his expectations. Its twin 152mm cannons (each longer than a Mastiff tank) could punch straight through an enemy tank without their projectiles deflecting, and its missiles were equipped with magnetically sensitive tips to track enemy aircraft. Its high-density ballistic plating, internal compartmentalisation and 15 man crew made the 310 tonne tank a monster in combat. More so than any of the other tanks in the JS series, it was intended to engage and destroy enemy armour; it could redirect its primary engine power to assist in the turning of its main turret, and possessed remarkable range; once the tank had been brought to a stop and properly stabilised, it was found that it could even serve as a makeshift artillery piece when supplied with high explosive shells. Its cannons were placed closer together to make it easier to strike the same target, and its armour was particularly focused on the front. Over three and a half thousand of these tanks were manufactured before Arkhangelsk began the production of the JS-4 and war factories had their SPAM templates switched, and over five hundred more have been built in other facilities, with others being built in Soviet friendly states. JS-4 Apocalypse Tank Main Article: Apocalypse Tank ZM-FI69 "Flaming Ivan" Siege Tank Main Article: Flaming Ivan =Self Propelled Artillery= V2 Rocket Launcher Main Article: V2 Rocket Launcher SU-180 Maul Self Propelled Gun Soviet doctrine at the start of WWII put great emphasis on armoured units, capitalising on their speed and firepower to achieve breakthrough and overwhelm the enemy before they could organise a proper response. However, prior to the outbreak of the war, virtually all artillery still consisted of towed field guns and howitzers, pulled by horses or tractors. As such, in the early days of the war, the Red Army's fire support was limited to aircraft, because the towed guns were simply too slow to keep up. Realising that this problem needed to be corrected, the Red Army quickly ordered design bureaus to begin developing a vehicle that could keep up with the tanks while offering the firepower of artillery. By early 1950, the Maul Self Propelled Gun was already in full production. Built on a stripped down Anvil chassis (with the turret removed and the chassis redesigned to better accomodate the new gun), the new vehicle was armed with a 180mm howitzer. To simplify production, the new vehicle was of a casemate design, an acceptable tradeoff given the Maul's intended role. It proved easy enough to retool several assembly lines to the production of Mauls, and soon the Red Army had their fire support. The Maul quickly fulfilled the Red Army's expectations. It was fast enough to keep up with the Anvils as they ploughed through Allied tank divisions, and was there to provide fire support when the Soviets ran into fortified positions. In the latter days of the war, the Soviets began to push it into use as a tank destroyer; its 180mm howitzer could be used in a direct fire role, and was powerful enough to bust the armour of Mastiff tanks with ease. However, by this time rocket artillery was beginning to gain favour with the Red Army, with the BM-13 Katyusha seeing increasing use on the frontlines and the long range V2 rocket launchers in production. As a result, gun based artillery was marginalised. Despite this, the Maul remains in service with the Red Army to this day, though it has been mostly relegated to reserve divisions. While it lacks the sheer range of the V4 or the shoot-and-scoot capability of Katyushas or Myeches, the self propelled gun is still quite potent, capable of shelling targets from long range or pulverising tanks at short range. V3 Rocket Launcher "Rockets fueled and ready." :- V3 Pilot During World War II, the V2 Rocket Launcher had proven its worth, yet not in an intended way. Designed originally by captured scientist Prof. Von Braun, the V2 was supposed to work as a weapon with a higher range than comparable weapon systems, to strike unit formations and bases alike from afar. While the range was indeed great, it required big targets for the relativly inaccurate rocket to hit at least something. The Soviet High Command under Stalin quickly noticed a valuable side effect - terror. Postum V2s were used to bombard civilian cities to strike fear into the opposition. Near the end of the war, Vodnik Rocket Arsenal in Vladivostok experimented with a new targeting system to strike with higher accuracy at the intended target. While still about 500 m off, it was a large improvement and considering the explosive payload, good enough for its intended role - to bring fear, and they remained very sucessful in that role. The chassis was also changed from a specialised vehicle to civilian trucks to save on costs, thus promoting construction of the newly named V3 Rocket Launcher. Following the death of Stalin and the end of the war, the terror role of V2s and V3s was removed completely, changed instead to providing battlefield fire support. V3 launchers were outfitted with more armour (somewhat at least), bigger tires and its drivers were slowly replaced by more and more women, since more and more men were needed as frontline soldiers instead. This later ported over into the again radically redesigned, compact V4, which was improved from its predecessor, with its smaller profile and self-arming mechanism, as well as its multiwarhead missiles and greatly improved accuracy. None-the-less, V3s are far from forgotten and are still employed extensively in the Soviet military, often serving alongside newer V4s. BM-20 Myeche Multiple Missile Launcher Track Main Article: Myeche MML Track V4 Rocket Launcher Main Article: V4 Rocket Launcher BM-33 Katyusha Multiple Rocket Launcher Main Article: Katyusha Truck Category:Lore